BERN.- Amy Sillman is an important voice in contemporary painting. Between 20 September 2024 and 2 February 2025, the Kunstmuseum Bern is showing the artist’s first major institutional solo exhibition in Europe. Sillman’s powerful and allusive artistic language refers time and again to the history of painting. In her presentation in Bern, she is involving works from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Bern.

The American painter Amy Sillman (b. 1955) has consistently interrogated her medium since the 1990s. Her works include drawings, prints and texts, as well as objects and animations. Sillman’s complete devotion to processes of transformation, reversal, reconfiguration and re-examination is characteristic of her painterly explorations. Her quick serial drawings and multi-layered paintings move deftly between abstraction and figuration – now they are multicoloured, now monochrome, now they show complex forms, now figures or body parts. And they are always filled with delight in painting.

“We would die if we no longer had humor. That would be total submission.” --Amy Sillman

Images × words

Inspired by her lengthy travels in Japan and the USA, in 1975 Amy Sillman moved to New York to study Japanese. Always fascinated by language, she took classes in calligraphy with a view to becoming a journalist or translator once her studies were completed. It was in this context that she first discovered her passion for the interplay between word and image, abstraction and figuration. Impelled by this enthusiasm, in the late 1970s she switched to the School of Visual Arts in New York to study illustration, but quickly found like-minded people in painting. She was shaped to a considerable degree by the New York art scene of those years.

Not only has she retained her background in illustration and her affinity for language and writing into the present day, but she has made them an integral part of her art. Her works take their bearings from traditional formats such as landscape and portrait, and from concepts such as abstraction or cartoons, but also from the fascination with the emergence of form during the painting process, which she explores experimentally.

The enthusiasm and care with which she paints, speaks and thinks about painting, are apparent both in her writings and in her many teaching assignments, as well as in the way she looks at art and the presentation of her works. Sillman has written about art for many years – both about her own and about historical artistic positions. Her references are as varied as her works, and include both anecdotes from her everyday life and art-historical treatises, often with an interest in practical work and form.

Sillman probes the roles of the figurative, of cartoon-like styles and abstraction, always driven by the question of whether something abstract can convey emotions, and whether a language can even form out of it. This is apparent, for example, in the 200 or so drawings in the series UGH for 2023 (Words / Torsos) on show at the Kunstmuseum Bern. Bodies and words are broken down into lines and guttural sequences of letters, becoming an experimental collage of changing emotional states. Shown side by side and above and below one another, they reveal a sense of process as well as the construction of an emotional texture: the forms and planes merge, double and change and, in their sequence, assume the appearance of a storyboard or a flipbook. But Sillman’s preoccupation with painting does not stop when she sets down her brush. She makes digital animations which, like her series of paintings, document the development of the abstract forms, imitate the dynamic of the process of composition and at the same time prompt emotions while often reproducing comical stories.

“I always cut, ruin, dub over, erase, add, scrape, bring back, continue, reverse. The digital just gave me a useful tool in being able to go both forward and backward in time [… ] not just accumulatively forward as in a painted surface.” Amy Sillman

At the same time Sillman is reflecting on world events, as in the series of Election Drawings: stick figures, black on a blank white background, lie curled up on the ground: sometimes cowering, sometimes in bed, sometimes throwing up. The black lines are robust, but also rough and above all angry. The series of 23 graphite drawings on paper was made in 2016 after the electoral victory of Donald Trump. Taking inspiration from protest placards, Sillman is concerned with the emotions which call people to action at such a moment, but which also render one incapable of acting.

Oh, Clock!: The exhibition

Amy Sillman’s powerful and allusive work is presented at the Kunstmuseum Bern with selected groups of works from the past fifteen years. The exhibition includes three series of drawings encompassing between 70 and 400 drawings, some 30 paintings and five animated films. It is conceived as a large installation of different forms of work which engage with time. Co- curated with the artist, it is marked by deliberate encounters between densely composed paintings and extensive series of drawings, object-like series of prints, video works with poetic soundtracks, wall-paintings, animations and installation-style interventions. These include the monumental work Untitled (Frieze for Venice) which Sillman made for the Venice Biennale in 2022.

The particular focus on the moment of time in painting arises from the artist’s lavish method: Sillman constantly applies paint, draws, paints, scratches or wipes away, overpaints until a work reaches the point where it expresses something and crystallizes a meaning from it.

Her art strives towards film and poetry, in which time can be compressed or expanded. Furthermore, for Sillman time is also tangible in the space that she allows for the process of painterly pictorial development, as well as for finding gestures through the act of drawing.

Here her critical revision of Abstract Expressionism becomes understandable as a contemporary struggle for the communicative potential of abstract painting freeing itself from the claims to mastery and heroic phrases of past generations, and, with its fragile and ludicrous futility, opening up new emotional terrain. Sillman’s turn towards the clumsy and the awkward lends painting a new currency and credibility at a time when the subjective in art seeks to be articulated in a hybrid, fluid and process-based way.

The presentation of her work is also particularly important to the artist. The exhibition demonstrates how strongly Sillman tends to work within the space and in a space related way: she alters the architecture with unfamiliar displays, she blurs the spatial structure through painting and calls the boundaries of the image into question. Through the unusual form of presentation of her paintings and drawings, she undermines expectations of a conventional painting exhibition, and brings the creative process into the foreground.